IN THE WEEK ahead, the Catholic Church in the United States is celebrating National Vocation Awareness Week. It is a celebration that is dedicated to promoting vocations to priesthood, religious life, the permanent diaconate and married life through prayer and education.
ONE HUNDRED years ago, on Nov. 7, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party expropriated the chaotic Russian people’s revolution that had begun eight months earlier, setting in motion modernity’s first experiment in totalitarianism. The ensuing bloodbath was unprecedented, not only in itself, but also in the vast bloodletting it inspired in wannabe-Lenins over the next six decades.
by Effie Caldarola
THE TALL, GOOD-looking priest had the craggy profile prompting the comment, “He had the map of Ireland written all over his face.”
VERY OFTEN people will ask me why I chose to become a priest. My answer is that God chose me first (John 15:16). Let me share with you a story that helped me in my discernment.
Despite the formulation you’ll hear before and after the October 31 quincentenary of Luther’s 95 theses, there was no single “Reformation” to which the Catholic “Counter-Reformation” was the similarly univocal response. Rather, as Yale historian Carlos Eire shows in his eminently readable and magisterial work, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450 – 1650, there were multiple, contending reformations in play in the first centuries of modernity.
IN THE LATEST debate over “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and family, a fervent defender of the document sniffed at some critics that “the Magisterium doesn’t bow to middle-class lobbies” and cited “Humanae Vitae” as an example of papal tough-mindedness in the face of bourgeois cultural pressures. It was a clever move, rhetorically, and we may hope that it’s right about the magisterial kowtow. I fear it also misses the point – or better, several points.
A FEW YEARS ago I came across a paper I wrote in high school. The topic was, “If you were a pilgrim in ‘The Canterbury Tales,’ what would be said of you?”
JOHN PAUL II called the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 to assess what had gone right and what had gone wrong in two decades of implementing the Second Vatican Council. In Vaticanese, it was styled “extraordinary” because it fell outside the normal sequence of synods. But Synod-1985 was extraordinary in the ordinary sense of the word, too.
by Lisa Mills
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION parish of Astoria has been a blessing to my family. As a mother of three children, I believe all children should have love, guidance and nurturing from the parents and their parish community. From birth, children learn kindness, compassion and morality through their parents. I also believe in the importance for spiritual guidance to be introduced shortly after.
by Father Sean Suckiel
When one hears the word “discernment”, one automatically thinks it is for those who only want to be priests or religious or, that discernment is about decision making about one’s vocation. That’s wrong.
